the whip to compel field labour; yet, when he is asked, in a subsequent part of his examination, whether there is a hope as to the fitness of the slaves for emancipation, he replies, "I conceive not; for the nature of the Negro is such that, unless he is compelled, he will not work." He does not even think it possible that, in any number of years to come, the slave would be prepared to labour as labour is conducted in other parts of the world; and, if free, he would be unable to take care of his family. Slaves made free, he maintains, become mere nuisances, and are no assistance to any one-(p. 41-45 and 60, 61). Emancipation would be the ruin of the slaves-(p. 115).

What possible use can be made, even so as to form an intelligible abstract, of such wild and contradictory statements?

It will be wholly unnecessary to follow Mr. Baillie in his details (p. 45-60) of the various employments of his slaves by day and by night, and which occupy many pages that tend to nothing and convey no useful information whatever. In the course of his evidence he takes occasion to allude to his anxiety for the religious instruction of his slaves, and to his having even meditated building a chapel for them on his estate; but his attorney told him it would be throwing away money to do so. He therefore abandoned the plan. His favourite ranger seems to have been little inclined to attend to religion: he preferred having three wives to paying it any attention-(p. 51, 52). The only conversation he states himself to have had with his slaves about marriage was to ridicule it (p. 157).

"Sunday," says Mr. Baillie, has become a day of rest by law;" and this he affirms in the teeth of the very last slave act, which legalizes Sunday markets till eleven o'clock. Again, "The slaves never have been compelled to cultivate their grounds on Sundays" (p. 55).-And yet they never had any other day allowed them by law but Sunday, until the very year, 1788, that Mr. Baillie first visited the island.

The endless enquiries and remarks about shoes, and beards, and razors, are only laughable. The object seems to have been to prove that the Negro's foot was not made to wear shoes, although it is admitted they wear them if they can on gala days, and while waiting at table, and that they may protect the feet from many an injury; and also to prove that the Negroes, having no beards, do not want razors, though no man can take the trouble to inspect a Negro's face without seeing that the beard, which even Mr. Baillie admits is conspicuous in the aged from its whiteness, is only obscured in the young by the common blackness of the hair and skin.

We may also omit the details about spell-keeping, and hospitals, and ploughing, and holeing, summing up the whole in a brief sentence:That, generally speaking, the slaves have, in crop-time, not more than six hours' rest in the twenty four; that hospitals are sometimes coveted by the slaves as a respite from severe toil; and that the hands of men and women are too generally employed in digging the ground, where ploughs and cattle would do the same work much more effectually, and to the obvious saving of human health and life. These are all points we need not touch upon or attempt to prove.

It were still more vain to follow Mr. Baillie in his loose, undigested, and wholly unauthenticated statements respecting the increase and

decrease of the slave population. He specifies, however, certain estates, in the management of which he himself was still concerned, and from which he had received recent returns of the population, which he affirmed to be increasing on all of them. But on inspecting the authentic accounts of the population of those particular estates in the year 1827, as compared with the year 1831, as they stand in the sworn returns of the overseers to the different parish vestries, it is evident that Mr. Baillie must have been misinformed on the subject. We find only two of the six estates he mentions to have increased in that time-namely, the estate of Home Castle in St. Ann, belonging to the late Mr. R. Hume Gordon, and Georgia in Trelawney, belonging to Mr. Thomas Gordon. On the former there were, in 1827, 318, and, in 1831, 339; so that, supposing there was no addition by purchase or removal, the increase by birth would be 21, or nearly two per cent. per annum. On Georgia the number, in 1827, was 255, and, in 1831, 258. The population of the remaining four estates was as follows, viz.-Blackness, in Westmoreland (the late Mr. Grant's), in 1827, 258; in 1831, 254; the decrease in the six previous years having been 33. Gibraltar, in Trelawney (Mr. Campbell's), in 1827, 163: in 1831, 157. Steelfield, in Trelawney, in 1827, 213; in 1831, 211; the decrease of the six previous years having been 26, and of the whole ten years 28. Orange Bay, in Hanover, in 1827, 281; and in 1831, 264; the decrease of the preceding six years having been 28, and of the whole ten years 45.

Mr. Baillie blunders sadly about the law of slave evidence. In one place he says (p. 122) that he never knew it rejected. The only law on that subject, however, the law of 1831, may be seen in the last number of our Reporter, No. 104, p. 446. He is certain, too, that a Negro cannot now be punished with 39 stripes, by his master or manager, for merely being absent from his work (p. 76, 77). There exists, however, no law imposing any such restraint on the master's power. Indeed, Mr. Baillie himself afterwards admits this (p. 120).

Being asked respecting the licentious intercourse between the sexes said to be prevalent in Jamaica, he replied that he did not consider that there was any licentious intercourse between them. It was true white people had all black or coloured mistresses living with them on the footing of man and wife in this country; but he had never seen any violation of decency. He could not name one friend, or any overseer or other person, who did not indulge in this practice. He had never known any missionaries who did so, nor any clergyman; but, if he were told they did, he would believe it (p. 108, 109). He could say nothing of schools: he had never visited any. Estates, he conceived, had nothing to do with schools. He had never put a slave to school, and never knew one who could read. He believed Mr. Charles Nicholas Pallmer had established a school on his estates* (p. 111, 112).

Mr. Baillie did not know what allowance of food the law required to be given to a slave when he had no provision grounds of his own. The law of humanity was the only law he knew on that point. He

The attempt failed. See No. 104, P. 346.

never knew a penalty enforced for an insufficient supply of sustenance to a slave (p. 125, 126).

In a later period of his examination, the driving whip was again the subject of enquiry; and he then contradicted much of what he had said before. He denied, indeed, vehemently, the use at all of the cart-whip in the field. It was quite another sort of whip which was carried there; and even that was used, not for punishment, but show. It was generally discontinued-not, as he said at first, in 1795, but, he believed, in 1815. He even admitted that the driver is not now prevented from using it in the field by any law. On the contrary, he said that, during the twenty-seven years he had been a planter, men and women did labour under the direction of a driver with a whip in his hand (p. 128).

Mr. Baillie had testified that the slave was not compelled to do half so much work as the English labourer did. Being re-examined on this point he acknowledged he knew absolutely nothing of English labour (p. 129, 130).

The question of the duration of night-work was again resumed (p. 130-137), and with the same confusion as we have noticed in every other pro-slavery witness. We again refer our readers on that subject to the notes in our last number (104), p. 337, and 417 and 418.

The time required by the Negro to cultivate provisions for himself and family no witness could state very precisely. One witness, Mr. Shand, did not scruple to say that one day, in some instances, or a week in others, was quite sufficient. The Duke of Manchester and others raised the number to thirty or perhaps twenty. Mr. Baillie seemed to think that the 26 allowed by law might be enough; but he always himself gave them four or five or six days more after crop, besides their holidays; and the Sundays, he adds, they may occupy as they please. He had denied, indeed, that they were under any necessity of working on the Sunday, and he never knew them compelled to do so. At length, however, on the eighth day of his examination, he went so far as to admit that "they do cultivate their grounds on Sundays, though he did not himself call them to do it" (p. 148, 149).

Mr. Baillie was very anxious to the last to testify that the Negroes did not work by coercion, and that they would on no account work for wages if free; but yet, after all, nothing but the fear of punishment really obtained from them the labour which was obtained, just as in the case, he said, of soldiers and sailors. But the Negroes differed from all other people, he added, in being more lazy. No man who was made free ever returned to work in the field (p. 151–154).

He was against all interference of every kind between master and slave, whether by Protectors, or by Orders in Council, or by suggestions of Secretaries of State. If the West Indians had been left to themselves, he thought, improvement would have gone on much more rapidly; it had been much retarded by the conduct of the Government and people of this country (p. 162).

Such, in substance, is the evidence, the confused and contradictory evidence, of this great and experienced planter, put forward with no

small promise and examined at much length. It forms altogether so strange a jumble of inconsistencies, and is so much at variance with truth, and even with probability, that we should have concluded that he had laboured, while delivering it, under some unfortunate aberration of mind. This would have been our unavoidable conclusion, even if we had heard nothing of the fatal act which soon after closed his earthly course, and which seemed to confirm all our preconceptions on the subject. We can only wonder that so acute a man as Mr. Burge, and one so well acquainted with colonial matters, should have rested the mighty interests of which he is avowedly the advocate, as he is the agent, on the testimony of one so little fitted to serve the cause he was brought forward to support. But, though he has since been removed to another tribunal, his evidence still stands forth, in all its native force, to condemn the system in which he was nurtured, and to which, for so many years, he zealously and perseveringly clung.

4. THE LORD SEAFORD.

Lord Seaford presented to the Committee a report made to him by his attorney in Jamaica, on the 1st of August, 1825, of the condition of his three estates in St. James's, in respect to the grounds, and the quantity of stock of various kinds, possessed by his slaves. The recapitulation is as follows:

The slaves on the three estates amounted to 864, and they possessed among them about 52 acres of garden grounds, and about 590 acres of provision grounds, in all 642 acres, being nearly in the proportion of three-fourths of an acre to each individual. They were also found to possess 131 cows, 26 oxen, 53 heifers, and 81 calves, making 291 head of horned stock, together with 522 hogs, and 1728 head of poultry. Besides the provision and garden grounds, the stock belonging to the slaves ran in the pastures of the estate free of charge. The young oxen, when fit for the yoke, were bought for the use of the estate at £10 a piece. They ran with the estate's cattle, and were taken care of exactly in the same way. The stock, his Lordship states, is bona fide the property of the Negroes. His manager has proposed to deprive them of this indulgence, but added that it would be necessary to purchase it of them, as, by the new slave act, they had acquired a legal property in all that stock. The proposal was made in a letter which his Lordship had received only the day before, and was suggested as a punishment for the misconduct of the slaves in the late rebellion. Being asked whether he assented to this proposal, he said no. There had been, however, as yet no time for signifying either his assent or dissent.

A question then arises respecting the law of 1831, which has affected to give to the slaves a legal right of property; and Lord Seaford seems to be of opinion that the law is so framed as to confer that right upon them. This point being important, and believing Lord Seaford as well as his manager to be wrong in the interpretation of that clause, we shall deem it necessary to give the law at length. It is the 14th clause of the Act of 19th February, 1831, and is as follows:

"And whereas, by the usage of this island, slaves have always been permitted to possess personal property, and it is expedient that such laudable custom should be established by law: Be it therefore enacted, by the authority aforesaid, that if any owner, possessor, or any other free person whatsoever, shall wilfully and unlawfully take away from any slave or slaves, or in any way deprive, or cause any slave or slaves to be deprived of, any species of personal property, by him, her, or them lawfully possessed, such person or persons shall forfeit and pay to such slaves the value of such property so taken away as aforesaid, the same to be recovered under the hands and seals of any three justices of the peace before whom the complaint shall be laid and the facts proved, which three justices of the peace shall have the power of summoning witnesses, who shall be bound to attend and give their testimony, under the penalty of five pounds: provided, nevertheless, that nothing in this act shall be construed or deemed to authorize any trespass, or to allow any slave or slaves to turn loose, or keep, on his owner's or other person's property, any horses, mares, mules, asses, cattle, sheep, hogs, or goats, without the consent of his owner, or person in possession of such lands, being first had and obtained: provided always, and be it further enacted, that the said justices shall not have power to investigate any proceeding under the preceding clause unless the complaint be brought before them within twenty days of the alleged committal of the injury and provided that such justices shall not take cognizance of any claims made by slaves for property above twenty-five pounds value, but all claims for sums above that amount shall and may be recovered by the owner in the courts of this island, on behalf and for the use of such slave: but provided always that nothing herein contained shall be deemed to authorize the institution of any suit at law or in equity for the recovery of any such claim by any slave in his own name, or otherwise than in the name of his said owner.'

Now, instead of admitting that this law gives to the slaves any really available right of property, and especially as against his master, we pronounce it to be a deliberate mockery, a studied evasion of the very right it affects to confer. To say nothing of the provisos, which are framed so as to defeat all hope of redress in the case most important to the slaves, that of spoliation by their master or his delegate, let us look at this boasted clause, as it stands, independent of these. Its purposed evasion will be more manifest if it be contrasted with the clause in the Trinidad Order in Council, which Lord Bathurst proposed to adopt, and which Mr. Burge, then Attorney-General of Jamaica, embodied into a Bill which was prepared by him in September, 1826, and afterwards brought into the House of Assembly, but rejected by that body, who substituted the above worthless and evasive clause in its stead:

"Whereas, by the usage of Jamaica, persons in a state of slavery have hitherto been permitted to acquire and enjoy property, free from the control of their owners, and it is expedient that such laudable custom should be recognized and established by law, therefore be it enacted that no person in the island of Jamaica, being in a state of slavery, shall on account of his condition be, or be deemed to be, incompetent to purchase, acquire, possess, hold, alienate, and dispose of lands situate in Jamaica, or money, cattle, implements, or utensils of husbandry, or household furniture, or other effects of such or the like nature, of what value and amount soever, and to bring, maintain, prosecute, and defend any suit or action in any court of justice, for or in respect of any such property, as fully and amply to all intents and purposes as if he or she were of free condition."-Papers by His Majesty's Command, Part I. 1827, p. 15.